Shropshire Star

Star comment: Children need net protection

There is a domain in which children and young adults are the ones who really know their way about and generally rule the roost.

Published

It is a sort of Lord of the Flies world in which innocence can be taken away and replaced by unpleasantness. It is a world which is here now, today, and parents are struggling to deal with it because they are standing on the sidelines uncomprehending, ignorant, or sometimes not caring.

This is the online world into which millions of children venture without adult supervision. Research has found that three million British families have discovered their children viewing violent, explicit, or pornographic material on the internet, with the youngest age of access being just two years old.

A previous generation of children were warned of the "stranger danger". There is now a global internet community of strangers and dangers into which children can stray without a trusted adult by their side to protect them. The cliche is that children know how to use new technology better than their parents. They are being brought up with computers and know the language and seem to have an intuitive knowledge of how to operate them. Parents are not a step or two behind them – they are miles behind them.

The proliferation of devices makes it almost impossible to catch up. Another survey has shown that the average UK household has six devices that are capable of connecting to the internet. Parents are finding it impossible to keep an eye on everything, all the time.

And maybe they do not want to. It is easy to let the child go on the internet, giving the adults a bit of peace and quiet. You can assume all must be well . . . until, that is, you discover something that shakes you out of your complacency.

Internet is a way of life now, but it is not life itself. Away from the virtual world, there is a real world. There are claims that we could not do without the internet in the modern world. Yet the survey which would be really interesting would be a survey which told us how much accessing of the net is for some useful purpose, and how much is browsing, and largely aimless exploration.

Parents who allowed their children to wander alone in lawless territory would probably get arrested for neglect. Controls and clampdowns may sound old fashioned parenting, but they are responsible parenting.

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